On Kingdom Mountain by Howard Frank Mosher Read Free Book Online

who owned the paper mill in Kingdom Landing as well as the land across the river. His woods crew had contracted to clear the right of way for the Connector. Eben had given him a map showing him where to cut.
    â€œWell, you’ve just cut twenty acres of my prime timber,” Miss Jane said. “Without my permission.”
    Twenty acres? The woods boss showed his tobacco-stained teeth. “Mademoiselle, in one little week we cut ten times twenty acres.”
    â€œYes. But those twenty acres belonged to me.”
    The boss shrugged. From the side pocket of his wool trousers he pulled a round dollar watch. It was twelve o’clock. He
got a case of beer out of a cooler and set the bottles, one by one, on a high yellow pine stump, like Rip Van Winkle’s tenpins.
    â€œ
À table!
” he called out, waving his crew in.
    The boss opened a beer, tipped back his head, and emptied the bottle in four or five gulps. He tossed the empty onto a pile of slash and reached for another.
    â€œThe fish, too, will come back,” he said. “Mademoiselle.”
    He winked at the men gathering around the stump. A short man with a black patch over one eye like a pirate laughed behind his hand. Unhurriedly, Miss Jane unslung Lady Justice from her shoulder. Using both thumbs she cocked back one of the two big hammers. In a single swift motion she raised the gun to her shoulder and blasted the beer bottles on the stump into a thousand pieces with a load of buckshot.
    Through the ringing in his ears Henry Satterfield heard her say, “If any of you gentlemen see Eben Kinneson Esquire before I do, tell him Mademoiselle Jane Hubbell Kinneson of Kingdom Mountain will be paying him a call.”

8
    T HAT AFTERNOON MISS JANE and Henry set out in the Model A truck for Kingdom Landing to beard Eben Kinneson Esquire in his den. Miss Jane wore her long black driving duster, green goggles, and a black motorman’s cap with a leather visor. The truck was painted a shiny black, with green and yellow wheel spokes. She drove with one hand on the big wooden knob of the wheel, also painted black. In her other hand she gripped her flask of Who Shot Sam.
    Miss Jane drove fifteen miles an hour at all times, in town
and in the country, with her left tires rolling down the exact center of the road. She took great pride in never having run off into the ditch in her entire motoring career. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the oncoming motorists she encountered. The aviator, who had survived two years flying Sopwith Camels over Germany for the RCAF during the Great War, rode the ten miles from Jane’s mountain to Kingdom Landing with one hand braced against the wooden dash panel.
    As they approached the Landing, a truck loaded with pulpwood for Eben Kinneson’s Great North Woods Pulp and Paper Company came roaring up behind them. Its horn blared out and the driver gestured impatiently for Miss Jane to move over.
    â€œI think he wants to get by,” Henry ventured.
    â€œLet him attempt it,” Miss Jane said. “He passes me at his peril.”
    They arrived at the paper mill, with the pulpwood truck riding their rear bumper, in the late afternoon. The weather had turned sunny, but the sky above the town was hazy with smoke from the factory. Sometimes, when the wind was out of the south, Miss Jane could smell its rotten-egg stench on Kingdom Mountain.
    Eben’s mill, which sprawled along the Lower Kingdom River, was larger than the whole hamlet of Kingdom Landing. A yellow mountain of crushed sulfur loomed up against the smoky sky. Nearby was a huge stack of sawdust and another of pulpwood. More pulp floated in the river. Two sooty brick smokestacks thrust a hundred feet into the air with the words GREAT NORTH WOODS INCORPORATED painted on them. Thick black smoke poured out of the stacks. Along the riverbank sat several dozen identical wooden rowhouses.
    â€œIn those wretched cribs, Mr.